Schedule and Speakers

Day 1 (October 10)Cabral Center (John D. O’Bryan African American Institute)
9:00-9:15 Welcome and introduction
9:15-9:45 History of military history/digital history
9:45-10:30 Roundtable about new approaches to military history
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45-12:00 Invited papers on network analysis in military history, and discussion
—Rob Warren, “Fear, uncertainty and doubt: doing good research work with partial network data”
—Micki Kaufman
12:00-1:00 Lunch (provided)

305 Shillman
1:00-2:00 Session on preparing data for use in networks and spatial analysis (Jean Bauer)
2:00-2:10 Break
2:15-5:00 Hands-on instruction in network analysis (Jean Bauer)
5:00-7:00 Dinner on your own
7:00-9:00 Hack session on networks (an informal session to help you make progress on your own project)

Jean Bauer is the Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University. Through a combination of formal training and curiosity she is an early American historian, database designer, and photographer. She is finishing her dissertation “Revolution-Mongers: Launching the U.S. Foreign Service, 1775-1825″ in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and is the lead developer of Project Quincy (http://projectquincy.org), an open source software package for tracing historical networks through time and space. Project Quincy also runs the digital component of her dissertation, The Early American Foreign Service Database (www.eafsd.org). For more information, see her website: www.jeanbauer.com. Jean will be the primary instructor about network analysis for this workshop.

Scott Nesbit (as of fall 2014) is an assistant professor of digital humanities at the University of Georgia. He is a historian of the U.S. Civil War, studying the relationship between military strategy and the end of slavery. His current research relies on Visualizing Emancipation, an interactive map funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that allows users to explore important sources for the history of African Americans in the Civil War South. He will be doing the workshop’s primary instruction on creating and using digital maps.

Alberto Giordano is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at Texas State University. His current research interests are in the geography of genocide and the Holocaust, Historical GIS, and spatial forensics. His most recent publications include the edited book Geographies of the Holocaust and articles on the social networks of the Holocaust and the use of historical maps to reconstruct battlefield events and urban landscapes. His research on the Geographies of the Holocaust has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Holocaust Educational Foundation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Shoah Foundation, and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure.

Micki Kaufman (MA CUNY, BA Columbia) is a fourth-year doctoral student in US History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is researching the application of text analysis and visualization techniques to the study of ‘big data’ diplomatic archives, most notably the DNSA (Digital National Security Agency)’s Kissinger Collection. She has employed network analysis to study and visualize the relationships between and amongst topics, documents, words (frequency and correlation), declassification status, participants, nations and organizations.
Her most recent findings can be seen at her Quantifying Kissinger page: http://www.mickikaufman.com/qk.

David McClure is a digital humanities software developer and interactive designer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before moving to the west coast, he spent three years working as a software engineer at the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia, where he was the lead developer of Neatline, a framework for digital mapmaking and visual storytelling. He’s also interested in quantitative approaches to literary study, electronic literature, information retrieval, and experimental philosophy. His website is dclure.org.

Ed Triplett is a University of Virginia PhD student who is finishing his dissertation on the fortified architecture that was constructed or occupied by military-religious orders during the Christian reconquest of Iberia. In the course of his research Ed has created two digital projects. The first is a thorough viewshed analysis of the frontier landscape via a GIS database of over five hundred sites. The second project reconstructs the fortress-monastery headquarters of the military order of Montesa in 3D graphics using advanced photogrammetry technologies and 3D modeling software. You can read more about his work at www.edwardtriplett.com.

Rob Warren is a postdoctoral fellow at the Big Data Institute at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He specializes in big data data-mining and the semantic web. He is known for applying these methods to a wide range of topics, including unexpected topics such as on Great War history and Geographical Information Systems. He has led several successful academic and industrial research projects and travels too much.